A documentation of a software component typically contains lots of system screenshots both of the system documented and of other systems. Screenshots may be provided in total or only as clippings.
A graphical user interface (GUI) is the face of an application towards a customer. For this reason, GUIs receive a high attention by product managers who take care that a GUI always reflects the latest corporate identity guidelines and follows the most recent design guidelines and best practices. As a result, a GUI screen faces frequent changes ranging from minor modifications such as slight color adoptions to major revisions, for example to reflect a new company branding.
As a result, product documentation which contains screenshots requires frequent revision in order to check whether the system status documented thereby still accurately reflects the system's actual state. These revisions at least have to take place when releasing a new version of the product, but typically occur more often. The revision is applied to the complete documentation (including the textual parts), but checking the screenshots is usually the major part of this work, for example because for the reasons named above, the textual part often need not undergo any change when the color schemes etc. are changed, while all screen shots might be made incorrect or outdated by such a change.
Currently, releasing a new version of a product requires re-reading the documentation in order to make sure it is still accurate. This includes rewriting parts that are no longer up-to-date. Some parts of the documentation may get skipped by the revision process, because of the fact that no changes occurred to parts of the system described therein. This might be dangerous however since changes in one part of the product may change the functioning and/or appearance of other parts though they may seem unrelated.
This re-reading and adapting operation must always be undertaken by humans since machines cannot be expected to catch the meaning of human readable sentences and thus cannot judge whether these describe a system's behavior appropriately, let alone replace them with something more suitable if they are outdated.
While reading through the texts of the documentation and looking at the intermingled screenshots, the human reader also has to check whether these screenshots are still identically produced by the system by the same means they have been produced by previous versions of the software. To be sure about this, the reviser might feel inclined to reproduce the screenshot using the current version of the software. If the screenshots differ, the old one gets replaced. If the difference is purely cosmetically (that is, the screenshots show the same things revealing the same information as before), this replacement must not be accompanied by changes to the surrounding text. If the screenshots differ but the difference is not purely cosmetic, the changes in the screenshot might need to be accompanied by changes to the documentation text.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,516,442 discloses to attach metadata to GUI elements. It uses GUI metadata processing logic to address the technical challenges associated with managing potentially large amounts of informational data describing a GUI. In particular, applying/mapping metadata to other GUI elements is described using a mapping record stating relationships between GUI elements. U.S. Pat. No. 8,516,442 associates metadata to GUI elements, such as buttons and the like, but not screens. Just attaching metadata to screens does not help in updating screenshots in documentation.